


I Still Miss Someone

by FloraStuart



Category: White Collar
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 12:26:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/597748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FloraStuart/pseuds/FloraStuart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are artists and forgers, both of them, and behind black lines on white paper they can be anyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Still Miss Someone

**Author's Note:**

> Written for White Collar H/C Advent Calendar. Spoilers through 2.01. The title is from the Johnny Cash song.

They don’t sign their letters.

(Like so many things it starts innocently enough.)

_Dear Byron,_ she writes one evening, sitting up in Byron’s old study with her feet up on his old footstool, his fountain pen tracing familiar letters at the scarred mahogany desk. The past is another country but she’s kept her passport up to date - several of them, under several names.

She’s sealed the letter and handed it to her housekeeper to put in the mail before she realizes her mistake.

The letter Neal sends in reply has no signature, only XOXO written playfully at the end of the page.

***

Thanksgiving is a subdued affair, for all her efforts to make it bright; it’s only the second without Grandpa, and his absence and Neal’s both cast a shadow over the day. Samantha is too young to remember Byron in prison; she doesn’t understand why Neal has gone away.

November is grey, thin snow turning to rain, and the last leaves linger in piles of autumn gold and burnt orange along the curbs, until the water washes them into the storm drains. She strings plastic greenery and holly berries along Neal’s balcony rail, wraps lights like jewels around the tall stone dragon keeping watch. She sits at the little table and listens to car tires on wet pavement and the whisper of rain and thinks about the Christmas she and Byron spent in the south of France.

She thinks about the Christmas Neal and Kate might have spent there, free and in love in a villa swept by warm sea breezes.

***

By November’s end the letters have no names attached at all. _Darling,_ she opens hers; Neal’s start with _Hey,_ or go straight into _I miss you._

They ease into it, like any good con; you have to read the slightest weakness in your mark, the slightest signals from your partner. It’s a dance they both know well, and they trace the steps in a familiar pattern. 

There’s something in an old-fashioned letter; black lines on white paper can be an effective disguise. Mozzie looks grim and worried, when he comes to see her after visiting. But from Neal’s letters you wouldn’t know he’s in solitary confinement after watching the woman he loves burned alive.

Neal talks about life inside, describing details she’s heard before, and she can imagine her husband’s voice saying the words. He’ll wax poetic about her house, and her coffee, and how he wishes he could sit beside her in the back parlor, just the two of them with their feet up before the fire sharing a quiet drink and it’s not (quite) a lie.

(Not unless she wants it to be.)

***

December without Byron is the hardest.

She thinks it’s easier this year than the last. The letters from Sing Sing on their thin institutional stationery are familiar, and she sees them on the silver tray on the hall table and for a few seconds she can pretend it’s only three more years and half an inch of bulletproof glass separating her from her husband.

The house is too silent without Byron’s laughter; she can’t look at the blown glass ornaments on the tree without remembering strolling arm in arm through the shops, picking them out together. She can’t look at the sweet-scented gingerbread ornaments without remembering how he helped Cindy make them, the two of them with their heads bent over the kitchen table painstakingly decorating.

She puts on old records, all his favorite Christmas songs, but the music only highlights the absence of his voice singing along.

The letters provide a lifeline and a touchstone; she sees them in the hall and when his absence aches too much she can pretend it’s only temporary.

***

She starts out telling Neal all the small doings of life at home: Cindy’s grades for the last semester and her upcoming studio project, Samantha’s soccer season coming to an end and Bugsy’s moping outside Neal’s door.

By mid-December she’s only describing winter in New York, the colors of the sky and the holiday displays lighting up the streets, the skaters in the park where he used to walk with Kate. She goes to every cafe he’s told her he and Kate used to visit; she’ll sip an espresso and write to him, describing the flavors of the coffee, pastries buttery and warm, and the view from the tables by the window. They’re letters infused with someone else’s nostalgia, but they’re not (really) lies unless he wants them to be.

(And he does, she knows he does, desperately.)

***

Neal asks her in one letter if she’s ever forged checks. Signatures. (He knows she has.) If she ever tried matching her husband’s handwriting. 

It’s a week and a half before Christmas; she’s just finished wrapping presents when the mail comes, sitting on the floor in the back parlor watching Bugsy tear at the leftover scraps of green and red and gold paper. 

She responds with a line or two in Byron’s handwriting. Not long, but a long enough sample for Neal to copy. No use pretending anymore. 

They are artists and forgers, both of them, and behind black lines on white paper they can be anyone.

It’s an invitation: _lie to me._

_Kate used to write like this,_ he writes back, and follows with a paragraph in a woman’s graceful hand, rhapsodizing about the artistry with which she shaped her words.

(It’s not an invitation; it’s a plea.)

***

Neal writes _I love you,_ after that, in Byron’s hand, at the end of all his letters.

She writes the same and _I’ll wait for you_ in Kate’s, and wonders who’s conning who.

(He never puts her on his list of approved visitors, and she never asks why; the illusion won’t work up close.)

***

Agent Burke calls her now and then, as the snow starts to stick and the shops get more crowded, as the aromas of warm gingerbread and sugar cookies fill the house, Cindy and Samantha baking to count down the days until Christmas Eve. He gives her updates on the red tape and asks her how Neal is doing.

By Christmas half the letters she sends are to her husband; the other half are from Kate Moreau. (She wishes she’d known Kate. She could make it more real, then.)

_He’ll be more honest with you,_ Burke says, though she never visits and he sees Neal every week. And June knows that’s true and it isn’t, at the same time; the lies Neal gives her and the ones he asks (begs) her for are far more revealing of his heart and his head and all the ways he’s (not) coping than anything he’ll show Burke or even Mozzie.

She’s not sure how to answer. _No, he’s not okay,_ she could say, but Burke knows that already.

***

Two days before New Year’s they take down the Christmas tree.

Cindy and Samantha help her pack all the ornaments into boxes, swathed in bubble wrap and tissue paper; they help her coil the ropes of lights and tinsel garlands, sweeping up the dead needles. She makes hot chocolate and they all sit before the hearth, on the floor where the tree used to be, playing cards until just before midnight.

When they’ve left and it’s just her and Bugsy, she writes to her husband for the last time.

She fills both sides of six sheets of paper with all the things she’s ached to say; she ends with _travel safe wherever you are going,_ though she’s not sure she believes in a specific destination; she signs _forever, your loving June._ In the morning she puts stamps on the envelope and hands it to the housekeeper. It’s a release; she feels it like a weight, lifting.

She takes Bugsy for a walk to the cemetery. Together they sit in the snow and she runs her gloved fingers over Byron’s name carved in granite and she talks, to the stone and the birds and the squirrels, the bare trees lining the path and the flowers and evergreen wreaths decorating the graves on either side. When she stands her knees are wet and her muscles stiff; the cold seeps through her wool coat but the sun is leaking patchily through the clouds.

***

Snow gives way to rain by New Year’s, unseasonably warm; the new buds on the trees in the park will freeze over before the week is out. For three days it rains, falling from the eaves in curtains like silver glass.

On the third day Neal writes back.

She sees the mail carrier approaching and takes the letter herself. She reads it standing in the open front doorway while rain sluices from the gutters overhead, foaming beside the curb in braided ripples carrying bits of trash. (All the leaves are long since gone.)

He starts with _please_ and ends the same way; _please_ and _sorry_ and _should have been me_ and _can’t do this without you_. He writes to Kate and it’s raw and bleeding and barely even coherent, a bandage torn roughly from a wound gone septic.

_I’ll find who did this._ The lines run into each other and over each other, weaving drunkenly across the page as if he wrote without seeing anything in front of him; half of it she can’t even make out. _Tell me who did this,_ he writes. _Tell me and I swear to you I’ll make him pay_.

Toward the end it starts repeating; she can hardly read by then through the tears blurring her eyes. They’re the same words, for more than a page, in different order and less legible every time. _Please please please come back I’ll do anything please don’t leave me._


End file.
